1945: A New Order of Centuries?

Hannah Arendt and Hermann Broch's "The Death of

Virgil"
Author(s): Austin Harrington
Source: Sociologisk Forskning , 2008, Vol. 45, No. 3 (2008), pp. 78-88
Published by: Sveriges Sociologförbund (Swedish Sociological Association)

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78 SOCIOLOGISK FORSKNING 2008

Dr. Austin Harrington

Max-Weber-Kollegfiir kultur- und sozialwissenschaftliche Studien
University of Erfurt, Germany

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 1945; A NEW ORDER OF CENTURIES 79

Austin Harrington

1945: A New Order of Centuries?

Hannah Arendt and Hermann Broch's
"The Death of Virgil"

In On Revolution (1963) Hannah Arendt heads one of her chapters with the three La
tin words inscribed on the Great Seal of the United States of America: novus ordo se

clorum, modified from magnus ab integro saeclorum nascitur ordo in line 5 of Virgil's
fourth Eclogue.1 The men of the American revolution, Arendt famously argued, suc
ceeded in founding the political community in a sovereign act of inaugural legislation
that instituted a "new order of the centuries" between the "no-longer" of old Euro
pean political and religious precedent and the "not-yet" of salvation on earth for all.
In contrast to the French revolution, which failed to distinguish political power from
a pre-political natural violence of the multitude, the American statesmen discerned
that a revolution carried its authority neither from belief in an immortal legislator nor
from the promises of a future state of reward but rather from a pure act of the foun
ding and constituting of freedom itself. The Founding Fathers in this sense "solved
the problem of the beginning, of an unconnected, new event breaking into the con
tinuous sequence of historical time". In altering Virgil's "the great cycle of periods is
born anew" to the "new order of the ages", the American revolutionaries felt themsel
ves to be traversing a "legendary hiatus between end and beginning, between a no
longer and a not-yet", comparable to those moments of hiatus related by legends that
speak of "great leaders who appear on the stage of history precisely in these gaps of
historical time":

"[W]hen the Americans decided to vary Virgil's line from magnus ordo saeclorum to
novus ordo saeclorum, they had admitted that it was no longer a matter of founding
'Rome anew' but of founding a 'new Rome', that the thread of continuity which bound
Occidental politics back to the foundation of the eternal city and which tied this foun
dation once more back to the pre-historical memories of Greece and Troy was broken
and could not be renewed. ... [T]he men of the American Revolution, whose aware
ness of the absolute novelty in their enterprise amounted to an obsession, were inesca

1 Arendt, On Revolution, New York: Viking, 1963, pp. 179-214. Since 1935 novus ordo se
clorum has also appeared on the $ 1 bill (saeclorum contracted by Virgil from saeculorum, and
further reduced to seclorum in the Seal). Epluribus unum and the bald eagle, also from the
Seal, appear on the front.

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 80 SOCIOLOGISK FORSKNING 2008

pably caught in something for which neither the historical nor the legendary truth of
their own tradition could offer any help or precedent. And yet, when reading Virgil's
fourth Eclogue, they might have been faintly aware that there exists a solution for the
perplexities of beginning which needs no absolute to break the vicious circle in which
all first things seem to be caught. What saves the act of beginning from its own arbitra
riness is that it carries its own principle within itself, or, to be more precise, that begin
ning and principle, principium and principle, are not only related to each other, but are
coeval. The absolute from which the beginning is to derive its own validity and which
must save it, as it were, from its inherent arbitrariness is the principle which, together
with it, makes its appearance in the world".2

Arendt published On Revolution 2, little over a decade after the death of her close
friend, the Austrian writer Hermann Broch. Is it possible that Broch s last masterpiece
The Death of Virgil, about the poets final dedication of The Aeneid to Rome in the last
twenty-four hours of his life, played some part in Arendt s thinking about America's
"new order of the centuries"? Is it conceivable that Broch s novel might have been one
major stimulus in Arendt s thinking about a modern Roman-American moment in
world history, in 1945 as much as in 1776 or 1787 - about a modern Roman event of
inaugural freedom and foundational world order, following in the train of death, de
struction and the disgrace of old Europe?
Arendt first met Broch in New York in May 1946, a little under a year after the
appearance of the book in German and simultaneous English translation in June of
the previous year.3 The meeting sporned a flurry of correspondence between the two
authors over the following five years until the latter s death in May 1951, amounting
to 46 missives from Broch and 17 extant letters from Arendt, the first of which from
May '46 spoke emphatically of her admiration for the novel as "the greatest poetic ac
hievement of the age since Kafka's death".4 Arendt also sent Broch a text of hers on

2 Arendt, op. cit., pp. 205, 212.

3 See Paul Michael Lutzeler, Hermann Broch: Eine Biographie, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,
1985, pp. 291-304. Broch at this time had been resident mostly in Princeton, at an apartment
rented from the historian Erich von Kahler.
4 Arendt-Broch, Briefwechsel 1946-1951, ed. P.M. Lutzeler Frankfurt am Main: Jiidischer Ver
lag, 1996, p. 9. Arendt subsequently published three statements on Broch s oeuvre, the first
a review The Death of Virgil m The Nation, September 14, 1946, pp. 300-2; the second an
essay on Broch s literary output as a whole in The Kenyon Review 11, 3 (1949), pp. 476-83;
and the last an introduction to Brohcs poetic and philsophical thought in 1955 in volume
1 ("Dichten und Erkennen: Essays"), pp. 5-42, of Broch s Gesammelte Werke (since 1976
Kommentierte Werkausgabe, [hereafter "KW"] ed. P.M. Lutzeler), titled "Der Dichter wider
Willen" (in English as "Hermann Broch: 1886-1951", tr. C. and R. Winston in Arendt, Men in
Dark Times, San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1968, pp. 111-51). The Death ofVirgilhad been greet
ed with prominent reviews in the New York Times, Time Magazine and The New Yorker, some of
which Arendt may have read, and she may also likely have encountered the book through a re
view by her first husband Gunther Anders in the autumn of 1945 in the magazine for Austrian
emigres Austro-American Tribune (see Arendt-Broch, op. cit., editorial note, pp. 227-53).

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 1945: A NEW ORDER OF CENTURIES 81

human rights, which subsequently entered The Origins of Totalitarianism in revised

form, informing him explicitly in September 1946 that she had put pen to paper in
response to one of the latter's own texts on the same theme.5 It appears unlikely that
the long manuscript on which Broch had been working up to the point of his death
on crowd psychology and mass psychosis played much part in the genesis of Arendt s
book on totalitarianism (which appeared shortly before Broch s death in the spring of
1951), but she did read one of Broch s summaries of the manuscript in 1949 and also
later read larger chunks of the manuscript at a time when she worked with Broch s wi
dow Anne-Marie Meier-Graefe in the preparation of a series of Collected Works of the
author, for which she also wrote an Introduction in 1955.6
But more striking than any other document of Arendt s enthusiasm for The Death
of Virgil is her review of the novel in The Nation, from September 1946, a text that also
appears to be the very first of all Arendt's writings to thematise an idea of free inaugu
ral moral action in the flow of historical time - one of the most central motifs of her

thinking in the post-war years.7 Titled "No Longer and Not Yet", in direct citation of
one of Broch s passages, a phrase she repeats in almost every paragraph, Arendt opens
with a reference to an image of Hume about silkworms and butterflies appearing and
disappearing on the stage of life in discontinuous series of generations. Human ge
nerations do not normally succeed one another discontinuously like such insects, she
writes. However, at certain exceptional moments, she adds,

"At some turning-points of history, at some heights of crisis, a fate similar to that
of silkworms and butterflies may befall a generation of men. For the decline of the old,
the birth of the new is not necessarily an affair of continuity; between the generations,
between those who for some reason or other still belong to the old and those who either
feel the catastrophe in their very bones or have already grown up with it, the chain is
broken and an empty space', a kind of historical no man s land, comes to the surface
which can be described only in terms of no longer and not yet'".8

5 Arendt-Broch, op. cit., pp. 14, 246-7. Arendt's essay "The Rights of Man: What Are They?"
(published three years later in The Modern Review 3, 1, pp. 24-37 [1949]), responded to
Broch's unpublished essay "Bemerkungen zur Utopie einer 'International Bill of Rights and of
Responsibilities'" (KW, vol. 11, pp. 243-77) and to a second text by the author from the end
of the year, "Menschenrecht und Irdisch-Absolutes" (KW vol. 12, pp;. 456-510; in English as
"Human Rights and the Earthly Absolute", in idem, Geist and Zeitgeist: The Spirit in an Un
spiritual Age: Six Essays, tr. J. Hargraves, New York: Counterpoint, 2003), which Arendt also
praised in one of her letters (Arendt-Broch, op. cit., pp. 94-5, 247).
See Broch, Massenwahntheorie: Beitrage zu einer Psychologie der Politik, KW, vol. 12;
idem, "Trotzdem: Humane Politik: Verwirklichung einer UtopieU" (1949), in KW, vol. 11,
pp. 364-96; Arendt's Introduction in English in Men in Dark Times, pp. 111-51.
' "No Longer and Not Yet", The Nation, September 14, 1946, pp. 300-2.
8 Ibid., p. 300.

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82 SOCIOLOGISK FORSKNING 2008

Viewed from the perspective of 1914, Proust's valedictory Recherche stands for a nine
teenth century ancien regime that is "no longer", where Kafka's parables stand for a
nightmarish future that perhaps is "not yet". Broch's Roman novel, on the other hand,
stands between the modalities of past and future. Virgil's last hours in the narrative
evoke an "ultimate effort to find the truth, the last definitive word of the whole story",
which "makes the last judgment a human affair, to be settled by man himself, though
at the limits of his forces and possibilities - as if he wanted to spare God this whole
trouble". The poet passes away like a man returning to peace after a long journey of
freedom into the still expectation of a language-less universe, finding the "bridge with
which to span the abyss that yawns between the 'no longer and not yet' of history, bet
ween the no longer' of the old laws and the not yet' of the new saving world".9
All Arendt's citations in this review stem notably from a dozen pages in the middle
of the novel where Broch himself evokes motifs from the fourth Eclogue, including
the key line magnus ab integro saeclorum nascitur ordo, rendered in one passage of di
alogue between Virgil and Caesar Augustus as "the glory of the ages [that has] been
fulfilled by our time". The poet avers that "we stand between epochs" in a way that
must be called "expectancy, not emptiness", to which the Emperor rejoins:

"What happens between epochs is empty and without chronology, impervious to

moulding, impervious to poetry; you yourself have maintained this, and at the same
time, almost in the same breath, you have praised this time of ours, this time that I
have been at pains to mould, as the culmination of human existence as well as of po
etry, as a veritable time of burgeoning. I remind you of your Eclogue in which you de
clared that the glory of the ages had been fulfilled by our time".10

A page earlier, the ailing poet, contemplating burning the manuscript of The Aeneid
in a fit of despair, broods that a reason for poetic endeavour "no longer exists"; to
which Augustus again retorts:

[A] "'No longer exists? No longer? You sound as though we were standing at the end
of something...'
[V] 'Perhaps it would be better to say, not yet! for we may assume that a time for artis
tic tasks will dawn again.'
[A] 'No longer and not yet', - Caesar, much dismayed, was weighing these words- 'and
between them yawns an empty space.'
Yes, no longer and not yet; that is how it sounded, how it had to sound, lost in nothing
ness, the lost, passed-away inter-realm of dream.. .".n

9 "No Longer and Not Yet", The Nation, September 14, 1946, p. 310, 302.
10 Broch, Der Tod des Vergil (1945), Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1976, p. 315-6 ("Ich
erinnere mich deiner Ekloge, in der du von des Aons Herrlichkeit als Erfiillung dieser Zeit
gesprochen hast") / The Death of Virgil, tr. J.S. Untermeyer, New York: Pantheon, p. 336.
ri Ibid., p. 315 / 335.

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 1945: A NEW ORDER OF CENTURIES 83

The narrative voice tells of perplexity at "empty spaces between the epochs ... the
empty nothingness that yawns wide, the nothingness for which everything comes too
late and too early, the empty abyss of nothingness beneath time and the aeons". The
Emperor, cannot tolerate any "abyss of unformed time ... no interruption must occur,
time must flow on incessantly, each moment simultaneously enclosing the end and
the beginning...". The poet languishes tensely in a state of "waiting, in expecting the
fulfilment ... waiting between epochs while yet between the shores of time... on the
bridge that is spanned between invisibility and invisibility ...". This again prompts
the exchange:

[V] "'Behind us, oh, Augustus, lies the drop into amorphousness, the drop into no
thingness; you are the bridge-builder, you have lifted this time out of its depths of rot
tenness/ ...
[A] 'Yes, it is true, the times had become completely rotten.'
[V] 'They were marked by loss of perception, loss of the gods, death was their pass
word; for decades the barest, bloodiest, most raw lust for power was in the saddle, it
was civil war, and devastation followed upon devastation/
[A] 'yes, that it how it was; but I have re-established order.'
[V] 'And so it follows that this order, which is your work, has become the one com
mensurate approximation of the Roman spirit... we had to drain the goblet of horror
to its dregs before you came and saved us; the times were sunk deeply in wretchedness,
more followed with death than ever before, and now that you have silenced the powers
of evil, it must not be allowed to have been done in vain, oh, it must not have been in
vain, the new truth must arise radiantly from the blackest falsehoods, from the wildest
raging of death the redemption will come to pass, the annulment of death.. ."'.12

It seems impossible not to think that Arendt must have felt in these passages so
mething of the calamity of old Europe in the death factories of the world wars, spur
ring a yearning for redemption from evil and nothingness - from "European nihi
lism" - in a newly invented juridical world order of the West. It is against this back
ground that it seems right to read the poet's gradual return to compliance with the
Emperor's imperial ambitions, praising his interlocutor for having "bidden the earthly
death and devastation to cease" and setting "peaceful order in its place", instituting
a "new order", which yet requires some deeper and more transcendent vision, where
"along with the new order created by you, a new perception must also come to flower,
growing up from the depth of our lost perception, growing as high as our loss was
deep, for else the new order would be purposeless, the salvation that we have received
at your hands would have been in vain".13 At first prepared to destroy TheAeneid, his

12 Ibid., p. 316-7 / 336-7.

13 Ibid., p. 318 / 338-9, 322 / 343.

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 84 SOCIOLOGISK FORSKNING 2008

own mortal achievement seemingly nothing in the face of divine creation, the poet
must resist Caesars demand for tribute to the eternal empire of the ages, just as the
artist must resist fascisms will to the aestheticization of politics. But in the passing
of the night hours, friends finally persuade the poet to surrender the manuscript to
Rome and thereby to seal the founding of the empire in mythopoeic epic. Virgil's pain
of unfinished creation thus gives way to an acceptance of completion in secular time,
in a sacrificial act of donation and a sacral event of foundation. Though Virgil's initi
al recalcitrance signifies that art refuses assimilation to political power qua myth, the
antinomy in Broch's narrative eventually finds resolution, the soul of the poet flowing
into the immortal work and the work finally into ownership of history. Thus the poet
intones: "Order is latent in the mutability of time, in all things terrestrial..., and whe
never one has been successful in creating order on earth, the real order of human exis
tence, there follows also the wish to erect a counterpart of that order in space ... there
is the Acropolis, there are the Pyramids ... as well as the Temple of Jerusalem ... bea
ring witness to the striving for the annulment of death by order within space.. ..".14
None of Arendt's pages in On Revolution cite Broch or her own writings on the aut
hor. Nor do any of the passages of her other major works in which the same motifs
recur, such as the essay collection Between Past and Future (1961) and The Life of the
Mind (1971). Yet the evidence of her meetings and correspondence with Broch in the
1940s suggest that the philosophical contents of the novel in the above-quoted lines
must have lodged very firmly in her mind throughout the post-war period.15 Again
and again after 1946 - and at no time before - Arendt wrote fervently of the "abyss of
freedom", of the "gap between past and future", of the "turning point of history", of
the order and rupture of the ages, of the act of beginning and the founding of prin
ciples, of "new generations", and of the inaugurating and reestablishing of a new-old
world order of law.16 It is true that Arendt looked sceptically on Broch's more openly
theologizing thinking about human rights in the last years of his life, repeatedly cha

14 Ibid., p. 319 / 340.

15 Arendt's footnote no. 53 in On Revolution cites Eduard Norden's Die Geburt des Kindes
(1924), Wilhelm Boussets Kyrios Christos (1913), Karl Kerenyi's Vergil und Holderlin (1957)
and an essay by Giinther Jachmann. It is likely that Broch also read Norden, and he certainly
read earlier works by Kerenyi.
16 Where Broch s dialogue speaks of "bridges" built "between the shores of times", "between
invisibility and invisibility, over "rottenness" and "amorphousness" (pp. 316-7/336-7), Arendt
writes in The Nation of "bridges over the abyss", "invisible bridges", "bridges of humanity"
and of things that "cannot be bridged with the rainbow of beauty" (p. 302). In The Life of the
Mind (San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1971) she also writes of German idealisms "rainbow bridge
of concepts" (vol. 2, p. 149-158) and again of "the gap between past and future: the nunc
stans" (vol. 1, pp. 202-16). Where Broch writes of "empty spaces between the epochs" and
of the "the empty abyss of nothingness beneath time" (p. 316/336), Arendt begins her account
in The Nation by speaking of the "opening of an abyss of empty space and empty time" in
European civilisation during and after the First World War (p. 300). Where Broch's ?

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 1945: A NEW ORDER OF CENTURIES 85

racterising her friend as more a philosophical lyricist of ideas than a politically objec
tive thinker.17 Yet The Death of Virgil does seem to have influenced some of the mo
tifs, images and symbolic frames of her writing at a crucial moment in her intellectual
career. It seems likely that it was Broch's treatment of the Eclogue and Broch s narra
tive tense structure that captured her imagination in the decisive first twelve months
after the surrender of the Axis powers.
Read in such a light, it would not seem obtuse to think of at least some passages of
Arendt's post-war writing as marking out yet another chapter in the narratological sa
cralization of Western world order under American protection after World War Two.
A "no longer" of a destroyed European heritage meets in this scheme of perception
with a "not yet" of Utopian eschatologies or false promises of deliverance evoked by to
talitarian regimes of the Eurasian East, along the same kind of lines set down in these
years by other emigre figures such as Leo Strauss, Eric Voegelin and Karl Lowith.18
Broch's story of the sacrifice and salvation of TheAeneid in this sense suggests a level
of symbolism in Arendt's thinking in which American political modernity from 1776
to 1945 makes itself ready at once to discard and to reapproriate Western antiquity,
in a kind of world-historical transfer of the crown of the Occident, analogous to the

? narrative evokes Virgil s nova progenies ("new generations") in line 8 of the Eclogue (in
Broch s words "Now there arises a new line, one of a loftier order", after a character pra
ises Virgil as "guardian of the new generation" and harbinger of "future generations" (p.
242/258), Arendt writes in On Revolution of the poems significance for the men of the Ame
rican revolution as "the announcement of a new generation, a nova progenies' (p. 211), also
directly evoking saeculi novi interpretatio in line 1 of the Eclogue in her opening reference in
The Nation to "turning-points of history" (p. 300). Where Broch s narrative speaks of Caesar
as having "re-established order in earthly affairs" (pp. 317/337, 333/355), Arendt in On Revo
lution writes of "all decisive political changes in the course of Roman history [as] reconstitu
tions" and of the "first act [as] already a re-establishment, ...a regeneration and restoration"
(p. 208). In this sense, she adds that "foundation, augmentation, and conservation ... might
well have been the most important single notion which the men of the Revolution adopted ...
by virtue ...of having gone to school in Roman antiquity" (p. 202); in The Life of the Mind
she comments that "the foundation of Rome was the re-birth of Troy, the first, as it were, of
the series of re-nascences that have formed the history of European culture and civilisation"
(p. 212). In On Revolution she continues that the men of the American Revolution possessed,
like the Romans, an "extraordinary capacity to look upon yesterday with the eyes of centu
ries to come" (p. 198), a capacity to act "as though the beginner had abolished the sequence
of temporality itself" (p. 206), where "the problem of beginning is solved through the intro
duction of a beginner whose own beginnings are no longer subject to question because he is
'from eternity to eternity"' (p. 206). The order extolled in Virgil's Eclogue and invoked by the
Founding Fathers was in this sense "great by virtue of going back to and being inspired by a
beginning which antedates it" (p. 210).
17 Cf. Men in Dark Times, pp. 111-21 ("The Reluctant Poet"); Arendt-Broch, op. cit.,
p. 118.
8 Compare Voegelin's series of five volumes, Order and History, Columbia: University of Mis
souri Press, 1956-2000.

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 86 SOCIOLOGISK FORSKNING 2008

passing of Greek culture and philosophy to Roman political and legal pragmatism.
Oswald Spengler's death elegy in the Untergang des Abendlandes finds itself reversed
in this picture as the cyclic fable of a passage from infernal living death in the night
chambers of destruction to a Virgilian song of birth in the light of day. Broch's earlier
The Sleepwalkers (1931), recounting the final depletion of the medieval European cos
mos that once found its theologico-poetic crystallization in The Divine Comedy, may
well have been felt by Arendt to stage this very experience of Untergang into the In
ferno, from which an Austrian-Jewish poet then awakens in the night to transcribe a
nightmare into a dream - as Virgil once guided the young Christian Renaissance poet
to Purgatory and Paradise, in the footsteps Aeneas before him in the company of the
sibyls of the Underworld.19 The Death of Virgil thus looks back to the future from the
hell-fires of 1945. As Europe sleepwalks into catastrophe at the end of the night, Ame
rica inherits the light of Western political reason in a transcendent daybreak of world
political foundation. It is in these ways that Arendt seems to have thought of a Roman
American modernity redeeming an exhausted European antiquity, as The Aeneid
reverses and redeems The Iliad, and The Divine Comedy in turn The Aeneid, each turn
of the epochs marking the decease and renascence of the other. A Judaeo-Christian
inheritance of civilization on the old continent is redeemed by a Roman-American
separation of religion and politics that itself finds secular consecration in the univer
salistic legal conventions and global humanitarian precepts of the early post-war years
- as if in a great cycle of the ages that leads from Troy and Athens to Rome, and then
ce from Paris to Washington as new capital "City of the World", whose denizens act
like the revolutionary French nation as cosmopolitan leaders and protectors of huma
nity. Perhaps it in this frame of mythology that Arendt thought of the citation of the
Eclogue in the US Great Seal, imagining a rejuvenated secular modern transcription
of the Judaeo-Christian story of death and rebirth.20 A brave new world of the West is

19 q? ?jate wnicn macle of Broch a poet seems to have coincided with the last stage of
darkening in Europe. When the night arrived, Broch woke up. He awoke to a reality which so
overwhelmed him that he translated it immediately into a dream, as is fitting for a man roused
in night. This dream is 'The Death of Virgil'" [The Nation, p. 301).
20 The child to whose birth the poem is addressed, she writes in On Revolution, is not a divine
saviour descending from a transcendent region but "a human child born into the continu
ity of history", a boy who, in Virgil's words, must learn "the glories of heroes and the father's
deeds" in order "to rule the world that the ancestors' virtues have set at peace". The poem in
this sense affirms the divinity of birth as such, proclaiming that "the world's potential salva
tion lies in the very fact that the human species regenerates itself constantly and forever". It
is thus a "nativity hymn, a song of praise to the birth of a child and the announcement of a
new generation, a nova progenies" (p. 198, 206, 210, 211.). Foundation and constitution thus
join with that of birth and nativity, with generation and regeneration. These themes, she also
writes later in The Life of the Mind, find an echo in the Georgics, in praise of husbandry, in
"the tending of fields and flocks and trees", where leisure, otium, is renounced for nec-otium,
for the brokering of business and the calling of citizenship, in a continual reproduction of the
polity (p. 214).

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 1945: A NEW ORDER OF CENTURIES 87

reborn in the union of the Atlantic coasts like the founding union of the Trojans and
the Latins on the land of Italy.21 In Germany's "hour zero" (Stunde Null), like Broch's
"fixed zero point" of the "earthly absolute", like a kind of "ground zero" of time and
memory, a new-old world order is re-born in a sacral event of foundation, marking
the deliverance of the peoples and religions of the old world from bondage and perse
cution to freedom.22 The caesura of the war in Karl Jaspers's sense marks a new axial
principle or axial moment of time (Achsenzeit), like a cut or hinge in time that founds
time as new time and new order of time - in a shift from an old to a New World, and
to a new world-ness and new worldliness, which grows into "a renewal of perception"
that "shapes the further course of time", as Broch has Virgil say.23
Arendt must have been familiar with Hegel's famous alteration of Virgil's tantae
molis erat Romanam condere gentem to tantae molis erat, se ipsam cognoscere mentem -
from "What a great endeavour it was to found the Roman nation" to "What it a gre
at endeavour it was for mind to know itself" ? in the concluding lines of the Lectures
on the History of Philosophy?^ She must also have thought at length about the words
"World History is a World Tribunal", quoted by Hegel from Schiller's poem "Resig
nation", which Karl Kraus once invoked against Austro-German nationalism in a tri

21 America, Arendt, appears to be suggesting, might inherit Rome s crafting of "system of

alliances" from warring parties who become partners, socii or allies (p. 210) in an "ever
extending group of Roman socii who formed the societas Romana (p. 188), just as it was
"Rome's mission eventually 'to lay all the world beneath laws' - totum sub leges mitteret orbem"
(p. 210). This would be an ambition "not to subject the whole world to Roman power and
imperium, but to throw the Roman system of alliances over all countries of the earth" (p.
188). The Aeneid in this sense suggests a near-exact reversal of The Iliad, in which "the end
of the war is not victory and departure for one side, extermination and slavery and utter
destruction for the others, but in which 'both nations, conquered, join treaty forever under
equal laws..." (p. 209).
22 Cf. "Menschenrecht und Irdisch-Absolutes", p. 503; Arendt, Revolution, pp. 59-114.
23 Virgil, p. / p. 353. Cf. Jaspers, Vom Ursprung und Ziel der Geschichte, Zurich: Artemis
Verlag, 1949, pp. 3-35 / The Origin and Goal of History, tr. M. Bullock. London: Routledge,
1953, pp. 5-40, 195-6 ("world order" and "world empire"). Broch's set of novellas
Die Schuldlosen ("The Guiltless"), on which he had been working since the 1930s, found
renewed stimulus in Jaspers's Die Schuldfrage (1945, The Question of German Guilt, tr. E.B.
Ashton, New York: Dial Press, 1948) and Arendt's essay "Organized Guilt and Universal
Responsibility" (1945, in R.H. Feldman, ed., The Jew as Pariah, New York: Grove, 1978,
pp. 225-36).
"Bis hierher ist nun der Weltgeist gekommen. Die letzte Philosophic ist das Resultat al
ler friiheren; nichts ist verloren; alle Prinzipien sind erhalten. Diese konkrete Idee ist das Re
sultat der Bemiihungen des Geistes durch fast 2500 Jahre... - seiner ernsthaftesten Arbeit, sich
selbst objektiv zu werden, sich zu erkennen: Tantae molis erat, se ipsam cognoscere mentem"
(Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, vol. 3, "Conclusion", para. 1). Hegel's dictum al
ters line 33, Book 1, of The Aeneid. See also Karl Lowith, "European Nihilism: Reflections
on the Spiritual and Historical Background of the European War" (1940), tr. G. Steiner, in
idem, Martin Heidegger and European Nihilism, New York: Columbia University Press, 1995,
p. 198.

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88 SOCIOLOGISK FORSKNING 2008

bute to Wilson and Kant in 1919.25 Yet today it is impossible to read her and other
writers' statements on Western political reconstruction in the post-war era without
thinking of the uses to which such rhetoric has been put in subsequent discourse.
Six Latin words from the Great Seal, first inscribed on the $1 bill at the height of
the Depression in 1935 - novus ordo seclorum on one side, e pluribus unum on the
other - have needed to be invoked, it seems, to bear witness, time and time again, to
America's great century of centuries that wants ever to constitute itself in perpetuity,
in a constant redeeming cycle of new presidencies, like a perennial currency that
circulates through the ages, as if somehow as self-evidently natural and quotidian as
the daily transit of the dollar across the stock markets of the globe.

austin.harrington@uni-erfurt.de

25 Schiller, "Die Weltgeschichte ist das Weltgericht", in "Resignation" (1786), line 95; quoted
by Hegel in The Philosophy of Right, para. 340; Kraus, "Weltgericht" (Oct. 1918), Die Fackel
499, repr. in In dieser grofien Zeit: Auswahl 1914-1925, Berlin: Verlag Volk und Welt, 1971,
pp. p. 150-3; cf. Arendt, Life of the Mind, p. 216.

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